Richard Heywood

This week we have been learning about food and how it gets from farm to fork.  We have learnt what foods come from animals, plants or both.  For example beef comes from cows, strawberries from plants and chocolate from both. (Mehdi, Esme and Fin.)

We had fun making butter using cream. We shook it up and down in a jar until it became butter.  It was very hard work!

After that we spread the butter

on some bread and tasted it.

It was very delicious. (Scarlett and Joe.)

In English we learnt the story The Disgusting Sandwich.  We wrote our own stories and instructions on how to make a disgusting sandwich. (Amber and Lucie). We also edited to help improve our work. (Harry.)

In music we continued to record and practise our music for minibeasts.  We have been working very hard on this.

For maths this week we have done some estimating to help us know whether we have got the right answer to a sum.  We have also been looking at 3D shapes and naming them and discussing their properties.  We have looked at cylinders, cubes, cuboids,  spheres, square based pyramid and triangular prisms.

In science this week we have investigated and learnt about the lifecycle of a ladybird. We drew a body and put the lifecycle on the circle. We then created wings and a head.

We also learned about food chains. All food chains start with a vegetable or plant, these are the producers. The prey is the one that gets eaten and the consumer is the one that searches for food. Humans are predators.

We have also been doing reading quizzes so we have been working really hard. In between doing the quizzes we have done lots of different activities in the hall, or outside. Outside we have been making domino caterpillars and a minibeast quiz and had to search for different facts around the playground. We also did some calculator work where we were code crackers and we had to work out how much each minibeast was worth.

Ant : a = 1, n = 14 and t = 20 All added together = 35

Can you find some minibeasts of your own and find out how much they are worth?

We also spent some time drawing Beatrix Potter characters. We then colour mixed and blended to paint them with accurate colours.

This week we have been working hard on boxing up a Peter Rabbit story.  We then created our own story using the boxes.  We then made the story more interesting and put it lots of detail by drawing out our S plan.  Today we wrote our new stories out in full showing a beginning, a problem, a solution and an end.

We have been very resilient this week as we have been doing lots of maths quizzes.  When we were not doing the quizzes we have done lots of fun activities outside the classroom.  Some of us did some gardening and planted some vegetables to harvest later in the year.  A group of us did a scavenger hunt looking for particular items around the school grounds and we then made a picture out of the items. We have also visited the library and been able to choose some new books.  We spent a lovely morning in the school hall creating and designing our own minibeasts.  We wrote facts about them and then some of us also attempted to build them out of lego and multilink.  A few of us designed minibeast houses.  Yesterday and today we have been code cracking. We used a code and calculators to find out the value of various minibeasts.

In music this week we have been very creative. We have been thinking again about the music we want to create for our minibeast groups and looked at the different instruments and their names.  We then talked as a class about how we could record which instruments we want to use and how we want to play them.

Our art this week was painting. We were blending and mixing to create different tints.  We started with a light colour and made it gradually darker by adding black a little at a time.  We painted caterpillars.

For PE Mrs Ash was teaching us Tri golf, following on from our success at the Tri golf competition.

This week we have revised subtracting, multiplying, dividing, adding and finding fractions of numbers.  We have reminded ourselves how to use written methods to help us solve sums.  In English we have done lots of writing.  We wrote descriptions of Peter and Mr McGregor.  We tried to describe how Mr McGregor felt. We also wrote a diary entry from Peter’s point of view.

In science we went on a bug hunt to see what lives in the field and under logs.  We then put our results into a Venn diagram.  We found spiders, ants, earwigs and worms were in all the places.  In music we listened to different types of music and tried to see if we could guess what minibeast or animal it was supposed to make us think of.  We all loved ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’, you can listen to it on YouTube. Can you find any other bits of music that make you think of an animal?

In English we have been studying Peter Rabbit.  We learnt part of the story as a story map, with actions.  (Amelia) We looked at different pictures from the story and wrote sentences about how Peter Rabbit might be feeling and what was happening.  On Friday we looked at a few scenes from Peter Rabbit and worked in pairs to do some freeze framing.

This week in PE we practised our tennis skills, we threw the balls in the air and caught them, then we had to bounce them with the tennis rackets. (Amelia) We then tried bouncing the balls against the wall followed by hitting the ball as far as we could across the field. (Alyssa)  We finished the lesson with a little game of tennis.

For music we tried making sounds that reminded us of different minibeasts.  We are going to compose our own music and we experimented with different instruments to see which ones suited the minibeasts the best. (Alyssa) We are going to learn how to record our music.

In maths we have been solving lots of different word problems, using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  (Charlie O) We had to read the problem carefully to decide what calculation we need to carry out and to find the important information.

For science we discussed the things around us and whether they are alive, dead or never been alive.  (Charlie O) Can you put these in the right category?  Can you think of other things that fit into each category?